The Quarry

Introduction

The Quarry gathers nine camp counsellors for one last night at Hackett's Quarry, using motion-captured performances from a recognisable ensemble cast and branching, quick-time-driven decisions to shape who survives a spiralling supernatural horror. Developed by Supermassive Games — the studio behind Until Dawn and the Dark Pictures Anthology — and published by 2K Games, it released 9 June 2022 and sits at Very Positive, 82.4% across the 11,635 English-language reviews this review draws from. That lifetime figure is worth reading alongside a cooler recent signal: 75 of the 100 most recent English reviews sampled here are positive, suggesting sentiment has softened somewhat since launch. This review reads a substantial, detailed share of both extremes, and finds a game whose presentation earns real praise sitting alongside two distinct, specific problem clusters — one about what the game actually lets you do, and one that turns out to be a story bigger than this single release.

Strong performances, a genuine horror pedigree

Start with what draws consistent, specific praise. The motion-capture work and cast draw real compliments, with several reviewers describing individual scenes as convincingly cinematic — "sometimes the CGI is so good it tricks me into believing it's a movie," as one detailed review put it, while still noting rougher edges elsewhere in the presentation. The opening chapters through roughly the story's midpoint earn wide, genuine praise as strong horror storytelling in Supermassive's established style, with multiple reviewers calling it the studio's best work since Until Dawn. Local couch co-op — letting friends in the same room each take a character — draws its own specific, independent praise as a genuinely fun social format, credited by several reviewers as worth the price on its own even by those otherwise critical of the story.

The choices that don't actually change anything

Here's the detailed, specific complaint running through a large share of this game's negative sample. The Quarry is marketed and structured around the promise every Supermassive game makes — your decisions determine who lives and who dies — and a meaningful number of reviewers report that promise doesn't hold up under scrutiny. One 895-vote review, one of the most detailed in the entire sample, put a number on it directly: "97% of the decisions you make are worthless and do not change anything," arguing the game fails specifically as a choose-your-own-adventure experience even while succeeding at individual scenes. A separate 433-vote review, from a reviewer who states plainly they loved the game overall, still flagged major structural problems: certain characters, specifically Max and Nick, are described as sidelined for large stretches of the back half despite being marketed as full ensemble members, with one geting only a single playable segment across the entire game. Several reviewers describe the ending specifically as the point where the story loses its earlier strength — one detailed 351-vote review laid out a clean structural verdict: "Strong story until chapter 7... Horrible story ending."

A related, more mechanical complaint concerns interactivity itself. Multiple reviewers describe the game as closer to "a virtual walking simulator" than a game in any traditional sense, with quick-time events described as infrequent and free-movement segments offering essentially nothing to actually do beyond examining scenery. That's a genre-standard criticism levelled at Supermassive's format broadly rather than unique to this release, but it's worth stating plainly for any reader whose expectations lean toward mechanical engagement rather than cinematic viewing with occasional input.

A multiplayer promise that wasn't there at launch

The single most-upvoted review this game has ever received, at 2,255 votes, makes a specific, dateable complaint: the game's promised online "Movie Night" multiplayer mode, allowing friends on separate devices to experience the story together, was not functional for roughly a month after release — precisely the window when the initial wave of buyers were most eager to use it. The reviewer called this "bait-and-switch tactics and misleading advertising," a serious characterisation this review passes on directly because of how specific and dateable the underlying claim is: a feature advertised at launch that simply didn't work as promised for weeks afterward. Separately, technical issues compounded the frustration — multiple reviewers report severe motion blur with no in-game toggle to disable it, and performance stuttering traced to the mandatory 2K launcher, requiring a community-documented workaround (bypassing the launcher via Steam's launch options) to resolve, a near-identical technical story to the one this review has already documented on a separate 2K release.

The same 2K story, told twice

Here's where this review needs to connect two dots directly, because the pattern is too specific to treat as coincidence. Reviews of The Quarry posted from 2025 onward describe the identical Terms of Service controversy this review documented independently on Marvel's Midnight Suns, 2K's other major 2022-adjacent release: an updated agreement imposing periodic online re-verification on games that remain, on paper, primarily single-player experiences, banning the use of mods, prohibiting the display of cheats or exploits, and including a forced arbitration clause. One 246-vote review used the same specific language found independently in the Midnight Suns corpus, calling the updated terms "literal spyware." A separate, even more pointed 858-vote review urged readers directly to actually read the agreement before accepting it, specifically flagging data-sharing language covering billing information sent to jurisdictions with weaker privacy protections. Finding the same complaint, in similar detail and similar language, independently corroborated across two entirely separate games from the same publisher is a stronger signal than either instance alone — this reads as a real, catalogue-wide policy change rather than an isolated grievance on one release, and this review reports it as exactly that.

Where the achievement data lands

Steam's own numbers show a healthy opening engagement curve — the prologue achievement sits at 73.5%, with an early general-progress achievement at 80.4% — before tapering steeply toward the game's numerous specific-outcome achievements, several of which sit under 2%, consistent with a branching narrative that most players experience once rather than replaying to see every possible death and survival.

Final Verdict

The Quarry delivers what Supermassive Games generally delivers well — strong performances, a distinctive horror tone, and a genuinely fun couch-co-op format — while falling short, according to a large and detailed share of its own audience, of the meaningful branching agency its premise promises, and stumbling badly in its first month with a broken multiplayer feature and real technical friction. None of that is this review's most important finding, though: what matters most for a prospective buyer is that this game's Terms of Service situation is not unique to this release. It's part of a documented, catalogue-wide pattern this review has now confirmed independently across two separate 2K titles, and readers deciding whether and how to buy either one should weigh that fact for both.